Coming up in April in Singapore there's the Asia-Pacific Conference on Library and Information Education and Practice (A-LIEP)-- entitled "Preparing Information Professionals for Leadership in the New Age". I'm particularly looking forward to it because some of my former professors from Charles Sturt University (Australia) will be attending -- and I hope to meet them for the first time. Having done my masters via distance learning (while living in Phuket, Thailand -- never having been to Australia), technology was an integral part of my library science education.

In terms of preparing for the future, one theorist few people in librarianship seem to be paying attention to is Richard Lanham.

Okay, he's not a librarian, but he has a strong vision of the role librarians should be playing in the Attention Economy. Over ten years ago he addressed the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and outlined "The Economics of Attention", a concept he then turned into an article in 1997 (available on his website), and now a book is due out in May 2006 from the Univ of Chicago Press.

In an information-rich world where human attention is the scarce commodity, the library's business is orchestrating human attention-structures.